First an apology: I'm sorry to have troubled all of you. I appreciate very much the opportunity to come here for help and now that I've found the problem, I am indeed contrite!

Second and explanation:
I found it... I thought I had commented out all of my print statements but there was just one in a subroutine that I did not notice was being called and it was printing the $test_crypt variable. The subroutine call was a bit further down in the code and I simply didn't see it.

Third a thank you:
Thanks for all of your inputs. This one was particularly enlightening. I just put these few lines in a subroutine and surrounded it with print statements and it was immediately obvious that the print was coming from somewhere else. I didn't ever really say that I was sure it was eval's fault, I did consider it a suspect, but your reply coupled with some of the others helped me pin it down. I have to confess that I was a bit slighted after yesterday's replies sort of talked down to me a bit, but now I realize that it was well-deserved!!! ;-)

A sincere thanks to all of you!! I'll try to improve my postings (and testing methods) when I need help again.

Doug